 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, episode 766 for Monday, June 17th, 2019. Folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We mix them all together so that each and every one of us, every week when we come here together, gets to learn at least five new things. This is not a challenge. It's a privilege. It really is. We were so lucky to be able to do this. We're so lucky to have. It's a promise. It's a promise. It's true. We're so lucky to have Clear on board as a sponsor at clearme.com. And we will talk about, talk about that. Actually, you can go to clearme.com slash Mac Geek Gap. But we'll talk all about that URL in a little while here, because there's a story behind it. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, as usual, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fearful, Connecticut, as usual, this is John F. Braun. How are you today, Mr. John F. Braun? Fantastic. And I had a fantastic weekend as you probably did as well, because it was Father's Day. And yeah, we did. I'm appointed. I'm appointed the host of our father yearly Father's Day celebration. So, you know, had to power wash the deck and get the grill going and by the goodies. But a good time was had by all. And we didn't get rained on because there was predictions of nasty weather. Oh, yeah. Yeah, rained here. It was good. Yeah, yeah. We had a nice day on Saturday. I actually had a gig Saturday night. And then for Father's Day, the four of us went to an escape room in Portsmouth and did a escape room challenge. Those are a blast. If you've never done one, I highly recommend it. It's so much fun. Escape rooms? Escape room? Yeah. Right. I think I know the story in general is that it's like you get locked in a room and there's a challenge and you get to find clues and stuff to get out of the room. Otherwise, you die a horrible death. I'm sure that's not part of the you don't get you don't get locked in. But but yeah, you have to solve these puzzles together. In fact, I did one at WWDC. The one at WWDC was a 15 minute one that was just for. It was, you know, themed. In fact, it was you have to save the keynote, right? And so there were these puzzles that you had to do the one, which was awesome. It was really well done, except it was really hard. And they are I've done very, very difficult ones before. And we have always made it through them. The one at Dub Dub, we I did not the group that I was with did not. And we, you know, we got hung up on one puzzle that we just couldn't get past. But the interesting part about these escape rooms and I and I think there were only a few groups that succeeded at the one at WWDC. Um, and one of them involved well, Kelly, actually, Kelly Gamont was part of one of the groups that succeeded, which doesn't surprise me because I have found that you need to have people that think differently from one another to to solve these puzzles. Or if one person gets stuck on something, somebody coming in with a completely different approach to it is often the way that you get through it. And that's why it works out really well for our family. When we did our first one, you know, Lisa even said, she's like, Oh, David Lucas are going to solve all the puzzles because those guys like solving puzzles and nothing could have been further from the truth. If it weren't for having all four of us, they are including Lisa and Sky. There's no way we would have made it through because everybody's looking at it differently. And and that was my that was, you know, our problem with the one at WWDC is it was five, I think it was just five of us. There should have been eight, but there were three people missing. So there were five of us and we were all, you know, guys that think like programmers and techies. And so there was there was no one at that critical moment to say, hey, so here's a different way of looking at this problem. And, you know, and that didn't happen. And so we just we just, you know, spun our wheels and ran out of time. But but it was fun. It was and it was a very well done one. And we of course got out of the one on on Saturday with about four minutes left. So we were in the one on Saturday for an hour or just shy of an hour. But yeah, really, really well done. We went to one one in Portsmouth called Monkey Mind. So if you're local, they do a really good job there. So who doesn't love monkeys? I agree. I agree. All right, I have a quick tip to share because it was actually triggered by a listener who was asking me how to get the high Sierra installer and my my advice to all of you is go download a full Mojave installer now while it's still really easy to do that. And you don't have to scour the internet looking for weird links and questionable sources. The Mojave installer is available. If you're running Mojave, you go to the app store, you go into you don't even have to go into purchase. You can just search for Mojave, say get it will open up software update. And then software update will say, hey, do you want to redownload Mojave 10 dot 14 dot five? And if you say yes, it will download the entire six ish gigabyte package and put it in your applications folder. And then it will launch it. Don't run it. Quit it. Copy it to, you know, your cold storage somewhere. I put mine on my disk station and then it's there. And now I don't have to worry about it. And even if you already have one from like when Mojave came out because many of you probably do this as a matter of course, like me doing it now, you get 10 dot 14 dot five in the installer, not 10 dot 14 dot zero. So that's good if there are have been new machines released or certainly you just get all the patches. It sort of saves you the headache of of having point zero. So yeah, so go do that before it's before it's too late. You do that too, right, John, you you save installers and just put them on your disk station or whatever. I'm looking right now when I'm bringing up the list here. So I would like to make a comment. All right, I got to put on the password again. But the thing is, yes, so I have installers almost back. So like the early days, one thing to note and I have to go through my installers is that to secure them, there's typically some sort of certificate embedded in the installer. And the problem is older installers, the certificate may expire. So you may want to, as my colleague suggested, download a newer version. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other thing I can mention is that you can trick sometimes you can trick an older installer by setting the date back to the date before the certificate in the installer expires. And of course, the last solution is, hey, if you want access to all of the operating systems, you get yourself a developer account for 99 bucks a year, at least. I think that I think it's still there. Do they still have them there? Yeah, I haven't got my update notice. Yeah, same. Yeah. As far as I know, the developer program will I think you could actually get 10.0 if you wanted to. The thing is for developers, I mean, eventually you have to abandon older OSes. But of course, they make them all available just in case you want to support them. So that's the other thing. But yeah, but no, you reminded me that I should look through mine. Kiwi Graham in the chat room has two tips. The first is he says, be careful with the Mac OS downloader if your disk space is limited, because it may just download the tiny installer that actually does the real download during the process. So make sure you got the full six gig thing. The download progress bar in the software update preference pane of Mojave will tell you how much it's downloading. So that. But yes, great tip. And then Kiwi Graham also says, and I'll put this in the show notes, he says, use the command date space 0201 0101 1 6 to trick certificate checking. So I will put that right here in the show notes. And of course, you can get the show notes delivered directly to your email box if you like every single week by signing up for our Mac Geek, Gab weekly newsletter. So I will put the link to that in the show notes. I realize that's slightly self-referential. But if you just visit Mac Geek Gab dot com, you can sign up right there. And and you get the everything all good. And of course, Dave mentioned our chat room, which is at MacGekab.com slash stream. Correct. Yeah, man. All right. On to Mike. Mike has a nice little tip talking about OS versions. He's talking about the beta versions. He says with Apple's even stronger warning over trying out beta software this year. I thought I'd mentioned something I do to stop myself from getting caught. If you're lucky enough to have a spare device, an iPhone and iPad, a Mac on which to run the beta software and you have an iCloud family account with a spare slot for someone, then when you install the beta OS, create a new iCloud account for it and add that as a family member. That way it gives you access to all your apps without the danger of mixing your live iCloud data with beta iCloud data. And that's not a bad idea. I've never heard of problems with that. But, you know, like I and I and I don't think it costs you anything. Well, it doesn't cost you anything to to get a family account unless you have Apple Music, in which case it it. Well, no, you could buy just a single Apple Music account for your for your main. You don't have to assign that. So even like for someone like you, John, you could just turn your account into a family account. And then you should be good to go based on everything I can think of here. So I'm the only one here. Why would I do that? Because of what Mike just said. No. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, I like the suggestion of using a separate iCloud account if you're using beta software, because what does beta mean? Some people think it means that it's just, you know, it's not shiny and, you know, pretty and stuff like that. But it could destroy everything. And I'm not kidding you people. It could because I've done software. Beta software could munch your data. So rather than having it munch your production data, like you're all your the stuff that you have in the in iCloud. I mean, I don't want to beta destroying all that. So no, great suggestion. Yeah, it's good to like it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Joe has a good a good point here with all the summer construction projects coming up. He says, you know, we talk about wiring everything when you when you have the walls open before you put the sheetrock up. Because, you know, Ethernet is very inexpensive to run then. As soon as the sheet rocks up, it gets a lot more difficult and a lot more expensive. So Joe says, I've been selling new homes for a local home builder for 19 years. I can tell you with absolute certainty certainty that you will never predict what type of wire you need and where you will need it in the future. That is true. He says, since it's commonplace in the Northeast to build on top of basements, he says, I have an empty electrical box installed at normal outlet height with two inch electrical conduit stubbed to the basement for future wiring. It gets covered with a blank outlet cover so it looks pretty and is left for future use. He says, this can be done throughout the house and run to both first and second floor rooms. I also do this with a substantially larger chase from the basement all the way to the attic, which will allow a customer to get above or below any problem in the future so that they don't get caught. You'll also find this far cheaper than placing cables, which you may never use throughout the house. That's really interesting. Yeah. So just doing two inch conduit, put it everywhere and then you can, you know, run cable wherever you want. That's not bad. It's smart. I like that idea. It opens up your options. Always look to the future. You know, I remember this day. Remember at home? Yeah, of course. That offered cable modems. Yeah. I remember one of the things. So one, I was an investor for a while. Sorry. Turned out too well. Well, along with all the other people that thought they were geniuses when they bought stocks during the tech boom and then all of a sudden they crash and it's like, whoops. But I remember one of their strategies for deploying, you know, most of it was fiber backbone, but they did one thing that kind of echoes this thought here is that from whatever call along right of ways, they would run not one, but two tubes. So one tube would have their fiber. And the other tube was, well, for whatever is coming next. Smart. And it's like they didn't know now they had other problems. But still, it was interesting. It's like, let's just put an additional pipe next to this pipe to look towards the future. So. I like it. Kind of like here. It's like always, you know, try to over engineer your solution. Hey, you know, put in. It's what we do. Cat seven. Put in cat seven. Yeah. But then you'll then you'll want fiber. You know, whatever, like, yeah. Paul has a good tip. He says it regards to a problem he ran into recently when he migrated from using the one password app that he had synced with Dropbox to the Agilbit's cloud for one password. He says, I've been using the app for about 10 years and have nearly 2000 entries. He said, I love one password, but I wasn't entirely happy that the subscription service doesn't enable users to do their own backups as is possible when you're using Dropbox sync. So I like this. He's heading down an interesting path here. He says, no one likes to get caught. And I don't care how sincerely any cloud provider says they're backing up my data. I like to be in control of this myself. I know other people feel similarly because one password's forms are full of examples. He says, so my solution for using one password's cloud while simultaneously having a local backup is as follows. Even though a person is using their subscription service hidden in the vault settings is the ability to set up a standalone vault, one that is local to the Mac. What I've done is in addition to my cloud vault, I, which I now use to sync between my devices, I've created a standalone vault into which I've copied all of my one password subscription synced data. I put this standalone vault in a folder in Dropbox, just like I had done previously. In addition to syncing with Dropbox, which gives me another cloud backup of sorts, the Dropbox folder syncs with an old iMac or an old Mac mini that I use as a server that's hooked to back plays. He says, so there you go. So he's got multiple backups. He says, for that real belt and suspenders option, I use Hazel on my Mac to automate copying the standalone vault located in Dropbox into another folder that I've created in iCloud Drive. So he's really got everything going. And the only issue with this is that he has to remember to go into one password and copy any new or changed entries. I guess he could just select everything and copy it over to the Dropbox vault and or to the local vault. And it would it would just replace the ones it needs to. But it sure would be nice if there was a way to automate this and really just to have a local backup. Like that that would be the key. So maybe maybe I'll I'll send this segment over to the one password folks. Maybe there's maybe there's an easy way or maybe there's a good reason why they they they don't do this. But but I I I grok your. Your concerns, Paul. Yeah, you don't want to you don't want to lose your passwords. Does you use LastPass still? Is that right, John? Do they and I was researching this. Oddly enough, I was researching this as you were mentioning this. And I found an article oddly enough, not at LastPass, but. The title of the article is where is my LastPass vault data stored locally on my computer, which I think is the gist of what we're talking about. Now, oddly enough, this article is at logmeand.com. I don't know why. Do they own LastPass? Did they did they buy LastPass? Is that right? Did they? I maybe they did. Yeah, I don't know. LastPass joins the they purchased LastPass in 2015. OK, well, I have an article which I just told you the title of and it shows you where it is stored locally. So that's something people want to know. So I will put that in our lovingly handcrafted live show notes. So cool. The the I looked at the one password data and I found where it's stored. But I don't think it's in a format that it's in a SQLite database, but I don't think it's in a SQLite database. But I don't think it's in a format that would be I think it's possible to extract from it in in an emergency, but not in a simple way. So it'd be nice to have a simple way. So so, John, I have a tip for you. Go up to if you have the, you know, the Amazon A lady devices in your house, go up, go up to one of them. And instead of saying a lady, you know, turn off the lights, say a lady, turn off the lights. And it will say to you, if this is the first time you've done that, whoa, did you just whisper at me? Would you like me to whisper back at you when you whisper at me and you can put it into and you can turn on what's called whisper mode and whisper mode will reply with a quiet whisper. If you whisper at her, your commands. So so there you can be in the comfort of your your own home, whispering sweet nothings to the A lady. Pretty cool. I've tried this with with the S lady and the G lady. Yeah. Dude, that's really it's kind of creepy. It's kind of too personal. It's it when it whispers back at you, it's really creepy. Like it is. Yeah. Yeah. But it but it makes perfect sense. Is she stock? I mean, is she stalking me or what? I mean, I don't know. It's great. I we because, you know, we'll use it like when people are sleeping in the house, you still like these assistants become very, you know, integrated into our lives. So it's like, well, I want to like find out the weather or I want to turn off the lights or, you know, whatever. Actually, the lights now it doesn't. It just gives the little chime confirmation, which I will just run the app. Run the Alexa app. Oh, sorry, I said that word. Sorry. But yeah, you could. But if I don't have my phone with me, I mean, I the devices are right there. So yeah, so you can whisper and it'll whisper back so it won't be loud. So there you go. Like I said, why would you not have your phone with you? What do you like live in the mountains or I don't always have my phone with me. Yeah, well, I have these assistants around my house. What do I need them for? All good. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes I have my watch with me. But, you know, of course, not everything's in HomeKit all the time. So, you know, you can't do that either. So there you go. Hey, I want to to take a minute and talk about our first sponsor if that's OK by you, John. Fantastic. So our first sponsor today is clear at clearme.com slash Mac Geek Gab. I know it's a different URL. They they they needed a longer one. So we couldn't use the normal one. So we use slash Mac Geek Gab and code Mac Geek Gab. So clear is it's awesome. There's a WWDC story that I have held back from you, John, because I wanted to wait and tell it here. Coming home from San Jose, the airport was full of people, even at like six o'clock in the morning. And I was like, oh, man, this is crazy. But before I left, I had signed up online at clearme.com slash Mac Geek Gab. And I had used code Mac Geek Gab to get two months of clear free. And what clear is is it's a really simple way to authenticate yourself at the airport. Instead of using your ID, you just scan your boarding pass and then you use either your fingerprints or your eye scan or a combination of them. It changes every time. And and then they assuming that that, you know, gives them the thumbs up, which which it did for me, of course, they treat you like a diplomat. They bring you right to the conveyor for putting your stuff out and and, you know, and then you go through whatever I had also had precheck and clear and TSA precheck work really, really well together because you just go right thing and I just walked through the metal detect. It was like it like it couldn't possibly have taken me a minute all told to do it the whole thing. But yeah, it was it was awesome. And it really makes life easy. Like I said, I signed up online before I before I left. And then when I landed in San Jose on my way in, I went to the clear chaos to finish my setup so that I would be ready to go for my my morning flight out, you know, five days later or whatever. And that I mean, it took me two minutes online to sign up at clear me. C L E A R M E dot com slash Mac Geek up code Mac Geek up two minutes to sign up there and then another maybe two minutes to, you know, go through the to finish the process in the airport. It really it's like I said, it's the VIP treatment. It's like you're a, you know, you're a you're a diplomat or whatever. And it's great. You leave your ID in the pocket in your pocket because you don't need it. They use your eyes or your fingerprints there in a bunch of airports. They just added Boston near me, which is great. But even if they're not in the airport right near you, they will likely be in the airports to where you are flying and therefore flying home from. So it can totally be worth it. They're in the notes they gave me here say they're in over 40 stadiums and airports around the country. I think it's over 50 now and you can add up to three adult family members at, you know, at a discounted rate. So yeah, this is it's totally awesome. And I highly recommend it, man. If you do any amount of travel, check this out and you get two months for free. Like I said, go to clear me dot com slash Mac geek, you use code Mac geek. And you get two months of clear for free. You get treated like a diplomat just like me. It's awesome. Our thanks to clear for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, you know, there's one other thing from from WWDC for my travels at WWDC that I was reminded of actually as we were putting this together and that's the ear in M2. Wireless earphones that that ear earbuds, I should say, they were the very first of the true wireless. Their M ones were and man, like I've been using their M twos for a while. I sort of take them for granted because they're just in my travel kit. But they are the most comfortable true wireless in ear things that I've had. They're more comfortable than AirPods and they seal in your ear so you can use them on an airplane. But man, just opening up my iPad to watch a movie with no cables or anything like that. Awesome. It sounds so good, so good. So I just wanted to re mention the the earrings because I highly recommend them. I went to their website. It looks like they're in between production models or whatever because they're sold out, man. So they're they're having a rush on them, which is good. But keep an eye out. And if we hear about them coming back around, you know, getting more stock or whatever we'll mention. So they're so they're not customized and that you don't send them the mold. But you were satisfied with the quality of the seal. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They seal really well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's nice. They don't like for me in my ears, I can I could actually like have my ear against a pillow or whatever or against the side of the seat. And they it doesn't bother me. They're really tiny and just like fit right in the ear. So yeah. So there you go. That's pretty cool, man. You know, we have had some we've had some reviews as of late on Apple podcasts and I wanted to share a few of them with all of you here because well, because they came from many of you. So and you can you can if you want to leave us a review, we would love it. It's always great. But and we appreciate it greatly from Ian Fiddler from the UK says I first started listening back in 2012, a few years after I got my first iMac through John and Dave. I learned to love using the Mac more and more than a feeling I ever had from my previous Windows machines. I got into listening to many podcasts and after five years I subscribed to so many that I had to let some of them go. Mackie gab was one of those and then four weeks ago I dipped into an episode and there they were just as I'd left them all the cool stuff and all the troubleshooting tips that I had stoked my love in the first place. I am back, baby. Ian, it is a pleasure to have you back and thanks for leaving the review. Like I said, you can go to Mackie gab dot com slash iTunes. I probably have to change that because iTunes is, you know, going to become less and less relevant of a term, isn't it, John? But but that's where you can go. What's iTunes? Yeah, I know it's gone. I know. But that's where you can go to. That's the closest we can get you to leaving a review is really all all all that is. We can't get you right to the like the front of the line or whatever it's it's called. We've got a couple more here from as Mac tech here in USA says always has great information. I really do learn a lot and I've actually found a lot of great apps and utilities based on their recommendations. Keep it up. Thank you for that. Let's see. I've got a couple more here from Hughes, too. I've enjoyed listening to Dave and John for many years now and have used their knowledge to solve countless Mac and iOS problems. Took me a long time to work out which one was which. If you're a new listener, here's a tip. Here's what he says, John. Dave is ticker. John is your I wouldn't necessarily call you your you're not sad. You're you're just more measured in your tone. I if yes, I I I actually agree with that comparison because. It's a good comparison for for as far as perceived energy level. I would say that you are is relatively low key and Tigger is. Like a spaz, that's right. I mean, come on, he's bouncing around all the time. He's bouncing around all the time and has more energy. So so I would say energy project your your comments on energy projection, I think, are quite accurate. It's it's a good litmus test for anybody that's having trouble deciphering who is who. So yeah, thank you so much for all these reviews. There's more and more. But like it's been great. Thank you. So if you're if you're inclined to leave a review, we would love it. It's great. All right, let's get to some questions. I want to be in that world, Dave, though. I don't think I'd want to be you or if I was living in that world. I know you are sad in that world, but who. Well, there you go. Or who I don't know who would you want to be? We don't get to choose who we are, right? We just we're just ourselves. And then and then other people see us, right? It's just how it goes. It's getting pretty deep. That is getting I know you're asked, you know. So there you go. Yeah, I'm Sean has a question. He says in listening to episode 762, you guys are talking about Clean My Mac and Malwarebytes. And I'm wondering, are there similar programs for the iPhone? Or are they even needed? That's a good question. And you're right. So Malwarebytes, they were sponsors. They had a run for a while. They may actually be coming back, which is great. But one thing they did, they asked us to talk about Malwarebytes for the Mac during those sponsorships. One thing that I think we've mentioned once or twice, but it's worth mentioning again, is that there is Malwarebytes for iOS, which can help with like not only different like web threats and things like that, but can also help with scam callers and that sort of thing. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes. That's definitely worth checking out. As far as Clean My Mac, there's no iOS analog for Clean My iOS because we don't get to touch iOS at the same level that we get to touch the Mac. There's like there's there's nothing an app could do. Apps only get to touch their own data. You can't you can't even give them permission to touch like cache files from other apps and things like that. So so sadly, there is no Clean My iPhone. I mean, there is, I think, but it's not the same kind of thing. So yeah, I mean, I guess there's IMAZING, right? You could use IMAZING. No, and you can do some cleanup with that. But it's not it's just not the same type of thing. But yeah, there you go. Yeah. I don't know. There you go. Well, there's another way to clean things up. What's that on an iOS device? You do a restore, baby. That is things get really bad on your iOS device. One way to solve the problem. Now, the thing is, you should be making backups of your iOS device. But sometimes things get so screwed up. And because, as Dave mentioned, you can't really get into the innards of iOS as easily as you can with Mac OS and that there aren't dedicated cleaning programs, you may have to do a restore. Yeah, now it takes time, but I've been in that scenario before where some cache files on iOS have gotten munged. And and if you just do a backup and restore that that tends to solve it like mail, especially will hold on to old settings and old like it caches mailboxes in a way that is frankly unhealthy. And there's no way to tell it to let go. You can delete the account when you bring it back. It goes and attaches to the old cache. The old I've solved it two ways with mail. One is exactly what you said, John, back up the phone, wipe it, restore. No more cash, right? Because it it doesn't back that up. Thank goodness. And the other way I solved it, it happened to be a Gmail account that it was happening with it's saved by just like it is on the Mac. Your mail is cached by username at it's essentially by email address, but it's at server address. So it's username at server address. So it was whatever like, you know, I'm not David Gmail, but whatever it was, David Gmail at IMAP dot Gmail dot com. Google has a second batch of servers or a second batch of DNS entries, I should say, so instead of using IMAP dot Gmail dot com, you can use IMAP dot Google mail dot com. So I changed the server and then that bypassed the cache. So there you go. So there you go, you know, that's that's that's yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because it's unfortunate that you have to take such drastic measures to clean up. Yeah, but sometimes I would I would love it if there was a clean my iOS app that actually like did it right. There's no way for that to exist. So whatever you find out there, it will not be doing it. Now, but now another thing to throw this in the ring. So I'm going to throw something in the ring throw. I hope you won't mind. But no, I had this today. So I was using the camera app. Yeah. And I would take a picture and it would crash. It would like go to the, you know, it would go to the home screen. And I'm like, what? Oh, that's bad. I was taking a picture by hitting one of the volume buttons, which if you don't know this, so this is at least one thing that you can learn. But I think it's is it the minus or the plus? Either one will will act as the shutter for the camera. OK, so if you can't or if you can't see the shutter button on the screen, then you can hit one of the buttons somewhere else on the phone. Somewhere else on the phone and take a picture. The thing is what was happening is that I would take the picture and then I would look at the phone and it was like it crashed. So the way I saw this problem was hold down the power button. It shuts off. It turns back on and asked for my passcode and then everything was great. It makes me shed a tear, Dave, because the solution to the problem is to turn it off then on again. Turn it off. But it happened to me. I mean, it never happened. I've never had the camera app crash on me. And I don't know. So first, I like tried to quit all my other apps because I thought another app was in the background was like doing something bad. But no, that didn't fix it. And now it's fine. It's just the mystery of iOS and. Yeah. Yeah. But have you had to happen like an Apple app crashing when you do something and it's like what? Oh, definitely. It's a good reminder that our iPhones need rebooting to, you know, our Macs, I I tend to reboot my Mac about once a week. I know some people like to, you know, chase their uptime numbers or whatever. I just find my Mac far more stable if I reboot it once a week. So that's what I do. But with iOS, there's there's no like you don't think about it because you you just, you know, it just sleeps all the time and you charge it. And you can your phone could be up for weeks or months until there's a software update. So, yeah, yeah, no, read, read, you know, turn the iPhone off and on. That's not a bad not a bad one. I like it. Paul has Paul has a question for us about Catalina. He says, where am I here? Well, oh, do I have a bad PDF? And I know what his question was. There it is. OK, he says, I've never upgraded my 2016 15 inch MacBook Pro from High Sierra to Mojave. I didn't do a clean install when I went to High Sierra and APFS from from HFS plus Sierra. So there's that conversion that happened. He says, and I'm very much leaning towards doing a clean install when I next upgrade because my Mac seems to be a little sluggish. And I thought maybe a fresh install on a native APFS volume as opposed to a converted one might help. So my question is this, I've held off moving to Mojave because I didn't really see any real benefit, but I really like the look of Catalina and Sidecar and many of its other features. But Apple is doing quite a bit with the new system volume where it's read only and obviously a separate volume, which is different from Mojave. I'm wondering whether it might be best to miss Mojave altogether and go straight to Catalina when it's released. If I were to do this, do you think I would benefit from a clean install of the OS onto a native APFS file system reformatted? Or do you think that the difference between Mojave and Catalina in terms of how it treats the system volume isn't going to be a big deal or isn't going to be as big of a deal as the migration from HFS plus to APFS? So I'll say that anything that we're about to say here is basically theoretical. I mean, it's based on some, you know, experiential knowledge with with what we've seen with Mojave. But, you know, I've only installed Catalina on one machine so can't really speak in any way about, you know, and it's a developer beta, too, as John said, you know, things will change. So although it's run fine, like I've had almost no problems with it when running it, which is kind of bizarre. It's a very stable beta. But I will say this. If you're cool waiting for the fall, then why not do the clean install? I think whatever you do next, whether it's Mojave or Catalina, I highly recommend, yes, just do it from a clean install. You will avoid any of those weird problems that so many people reported to us with those APFS converted volumes. But that said, if you want to do Mojave now and then upgrade to Catalina, I feel pretty good about this migration from the I'll call it one volume of APFS of Mojave to the two volume of Catalina. That's not entirely true. There's actually a third recovery volume, right? But because the thing is, it's not all these volumes in APFS aren't like partitions were prior, right? They are they're just pointers. It's just like, well, organize these files this way. I mean, it's it's it's somebody's going to yell at me for saying this, but it's almost like, you know, just separate folders. It they're all on the same storage. They're all in the same blob of storage. There's no physical separation like there used to be in the old days. So saying I want another volume to an APFS disk is like it'll say, OK, cool. Here you go. But whatever you want in it, do you want a quota on it? Meaning, do you want to limit the size of the documents that can be there? Or do you not? And do you just want to have it share the big blob of data? And when it's full by whatever means it's full, and that's the end of it. So moving to a system volume in that sense, really isn't a big deal. In fact, it's probably a safer upgrade installation than anything we've had in the past, because it probably doesn't have to replace anything. It just puts the new stuff out there and deletes the old, you know, once it's done. So I think we might even have less instances. And this is speculation, less instances of even failed install or failed upgrades from Mojave to Catalina. So yeah, I think I think you're fine. If you want to do Mojave now, I would do that clean based on what you said. And then and then, you know, go from there. So yeah, what do you think, John? Um. I'm going to disagree. I just go straight from the old to the new. In what way? Like well, rather than doing an interim update, just just, you know, go all the way. Oh, yeah, sure. If he wants to wait till the fall, that's just what I do. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but if he I mean, he doesn't have Mojave now, so if he wants Mojave now, but would you say that he should just upgrade or or wipe that drive? Yes, which? No, I if it was me, I think I would just do the upgrade when it's available, when the release is available. Even though he's on a disk that was upgraded from HFS plus to or migrated from HFS plus to APFS. Yes. Even though we've we've learned that lesson the hard way. I don't think so. Yeah, the thing is, the thing is, I got to tell you, my friend, is that both of my systems, I have not done a clean install in either of my systems. When I run this utility, when there are problems, both of my systems are migrated systems using what was it? APFS convert underscore convert. I think you see when you run this utility. I thought with all those problems. I'm still in that state. Oh, I thought you fixed that. Oh, interesting. I had I had not reformatted my systems. But the thing is, I think the problem was kind of fixed in the background, because if you run something like our pal hardware grower, I'll see every now and then it's like mounting recovery or mounting firmer up. And I'm like, what are you doing? Oh, interesting. Have you seen these? I don't run hardware grower. So I know. But the thing is hardware grower shows you when the OS or other things mount something like my favorite is Oh, Google update is updating your stuff because Google update is kind of sneaky. Is it doesn't really ask you or tell you it just like doesn't in the background? Right. Hardware grower shows you a disk mounting and it's like, ah, but I see the same thing every now and then. It's like, oh, recovery mounted. And I'm like, well, why did recovery mount? That's interesting to get to. Or firmer. Sometimes it shows like, you know, firmware, blah, blah, blah, blah, mounted. And I'm like, what the heck's that? So I figured they're doing maintenance in the background where I guess what I'm saying is that, yes, I understand the concern about the I think most people would agree that the conversion process from HFS plus the APFS was had some issues. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But what I'm saying is that I have not done a fresh install and it seems that whatever problems they had have fixed themselves. Or you aren't seeing symptoms of them anymore. Right. OK, yeah, which may mean that they have fixed themselves. I mean, that's totally possible, huh? All right. Well, there you go. So they take, I don't know what to tell you, Paul. There you go. Like I am happy. I mean, to me it's just it's just your time. The thing is, my only concern is when I hear about doing a nuke and pave and fresh install and stuff is that it just the mechanics of doing so, especially if you have to get all your codes, you know, it's just it's pain in the neck. It's not as much of a pain in the neck as you might think. OK, you've been through it. Yeah, and I avoided it. And then when I did it, it was like, oh, I should have just done this like this is fine. Well, as long as you keep good records or you buy your apps all in the app store, which to me, that's the best solution. Yeah, if you buy all your apps in the app store, you don't need to enter the cell phone. All my apps were available in the app store and then Apple didn't cripple them. That would be great. But you know, but most of them are. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, a lot of them anyway. Yeah, set app is another source of apps for me. And that's, you know, another way to do that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, we're on the subject. Why not? Craig has has a question. He says, I have a 2015 5K retina iMac. It started its life with El Capitan and has progressed via upgrades to Sierra, High Sierra and now Mojave. System has been progressively become more sluggish over this time frame. Now there is lag on occasion when launching apps, switching apps, etc. I use it for basic business things, nothing unusual or out of the mainstream office, Skype for Biz, etc. He says, I use iStat menus and I see no unusual consumption of resources. So I write the sluggishness off to aging hardware, although somewhat surprised at how frequent the sluggishness is. It's worse at system boot, but I'm thinking some of that has to do with disk indexing that happens. Given all the above, my plan is to have my one terabyte hard drive replaced with a one terabyte SSD. The question relates into the manner in which to make the migration. One option is to simply use carbon copy cloner and clone the hard drive, install the SSD and then use carbon copy cloner to clone it back to the SSD. However, I'm worried in doing that that any major cruft will simply remain and continue to make the system run less than optimally. The other option I'm considering is to do a fresh build of the latest OS boot on the SSD. The reason for this is that I can then use a migration assistant to bring everything over to the new OS. This is where the question comes in when using migration assistant from a clone that was LCAP, Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave, is this reduction in cruft sufficient versus doing that nuke and pave that we just mentioned? So I'll answer the second question first since that's basically the topic that we're on. Then I wanna talk about the way to get to the SSD, but yeah, like I said, to me it's not that bad to do the migration or to do the nuke and pave. It's been a while. I mean, you're talking four different OS versions on there. There's probably a lot of crap out there that you just aren't gonna wanna mess with. So I would do the nuke and pave on this one. And then would I use migration assistant? Probably not. I would be tempted to. Migration assistant does an okay job, but it doesn't know what it doesn't know, right? It can't know that you aren't interested in that app you installed once. And so it's gonna bring that folder in your library folder over along with you. So that's where I feel like the nice part is you will be left with a clone of your old drive as it was. So at any time, if there's something missing, you can just go back to it and bring it over. So you're in a very good position here. I would do the nuke and pave. I would take this option to do it. That's just me. What do you think, man? Okay. But are you still the same mind? Why, were you expecting me to, are you expecting me to challenge you? Not necessarily. I just, you're a free thinker. Yeah, we're all free thinker. Well, we'd like to thank- We think we're- Except for the alien overlords. That's right. Who command our every. That's right. The mind's good. Mine's a- Yeah, I've got my overlapped train pretty well. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah. I mean, I have to whisper- The only thing- But that's, you know, that's fine. Yeah. Yeah, it's all right. In the shadows. In the shadows. At night. That's right. Yes. Oh my gosh. I gotta tell you some of the shows I'm watching. Maybe a little later. Maybe off a little later. I mean, the only thing I think is that, so you know, I mean, we have this recurring discussion about cruft. And the thing is, what's everybody's deal with cruft? I mean, is it the space it takes up, or is it the additional complexities it causes in your system stability that makes you not wanna have config files and caches and stuff from old things. So, one thing I would suggest, all right, if you don't wanna do the nuke and pave. Onyx I found is very good in that they do have, I think it's the maintenance category, but the thing is they have, so if you're concerned about cruft is in like old, stale data that's gonna screw things up because it uses that instead of the fresh data, which it should, but sometimes it doesn't, then Onyx I think is one of your best friends. Well, CleanMyMac and CleanMyMac, I'd say would be another one. That I was gonna- If you're concerned about the cruftiness. The nice part about CleanMyMac is it will tell you, hey, look, you haven't launched this app in more than six months, more than a year, those kinds of things. And so you could use that and say, all right, I wanna delete this stuff and then it will go and be fairly thorough about finding all the other things that are out there. So that's actually a feature I would love on iOS, something that would tell me you haven't used this app in six months, do you want me to delete it? God, I don't just want it to offload it. Well, they kind of do that now, right? Don't they? With the offload. As far as, last I checked, you can defer apps to the cloud if you're running out of space. But I don't wanna defer it to the cloud. If I installed it and used it once, and you know, yeah, and I actually deferred to the cloud thing, bit me once because I was offline in a theater and I was like, great, I need to launch the mixer app that I put on here a year ago so that when I ran into this mixer, I would be in good shape. And it's like, oh, that's offline in the cloud. It's like, why? I don't know. No, this iPad is only used for this. Like, don't mess with it. But anyway. No, so you probably accidentally left that setting on. I did. Yeah, I've since fixed that, that's right. Yeah, and I forget where that setting is. I mean, I think in theory, it's a good idea, but if you're not in an area that has reliable connectivity, then yeah, that can be a bummer. It's like, yeah, a little bit of a bummer. Yeah, that's one way to put it. That's cool. Like an app you need now. Yeah. And there's no way to get it. If you go into settings, this is on iOS and presumably iPad OS if you're running a beta, but settings, iTunes and App Store, there is an option for offload unused apps. And so you should make a mindful choice about that. It might be fine for you or you might be like me and not want that at all. So yeah, good stuff. In terms of Craig, like getting that SSD in there, you certainly can, like it's a retina iMac. It's not that hard to go in there and take it apart, but you've got Thunderbolt on that. So you don't have to replace the SSD or replace the internal hard drive. You could leave the internal hard drive right where it is, have your SSD external on like a USB 3 bus or whatever and just boot from an external drive. There's nothing wrong with that. Your iMac, unless you treat it like a portable machine and you're carting it around all the time, probably you probably won't even realize that you're booting from an external drive. You just set it up and set it and forget it. Ronco style. So that's what I would do just to save, I don't know, save time. Ronco. You know, Ron Popeal, the guy on TV with like the chopper and the slicer or whatever. And he has that, the Ron Popeal, I call it the easy bake oven, it's not. But you know, he had, or maybe it is, I don't know. I don't think it is, I think that's for kids. But- I thought you said Ronco. Well, Ronco is the name of his company. No, Ronco. Oh, it is. Ronco is Ron Popeal. Yeah. And his whole thing was set it and forget it, right? You know, so that was his whole deal, so. Yeah, only available through this TV offer. Correct. Not available in stores. Not available as seen on TV. I always wondered about that. Yeah. It's like, what's so wrong with your product that you don't sell in stores? Well, stores charge you like shelf fees and like it's crazy, man. Stores, like especially when- Yeah, but they also like shield the population from like products that can like harm you or kill you. I saw that, whenever I saw this disclaimer, I'm like, why are you not selling it in stores? Oh, because he can offer you a better price. He's Ron Popeal, man. But, oh, you're right. No, I mean, everybody gets their cut or everybody wants their cut. So yeah, if you sell directly to the consumer, I can understand the business model better. Yeah, exactly. All right, what else we got here? Jed's got a question for us. Jed, take it away, man. Hey, guys, this is Jed. I thought I would leave an audio message. You haven't had as many audio messages as recently, so I thought I would save your voice at some, give them a little rest. I'm calling about a home internet thermostat kind of internet things question. I know it's not Apple, but it's like all kind of the same umbrella nowadays. And I guess my question is, what you guys are thinking about them all? I have two nests right now. I'll be moving and I'm debating what to buy. And although I like the fact that utilities usually give you lots of money for a nest, so they're subsidized, I don't love that the nest thinks it's smarter than me and isn't so schedule friendly. It's much more like, let me tell you what to do and you will listen to me. It may be smarter than me, but I don't want to be told that it is. So I was curious what your thoughts were. I liked that the idea of, I think it's the ecobee or the honeywell that has, you could put different zones in different rooms. I know you were talking about that, but I know it's not as intuitive as the nest. So I'm just trying to kind of figure it all out. Thought it'd be worth, you know, going down the rabbit hole. Thanks a lot. And there's actually my second time I recorded this because the first time the wind just made it inaudible through my AirPods. So I guess I kind of got caught. All right, thanks. Bye. Thanks, Chad. You're right, that is the problem with the nest is that it thinks it's smarter than you. And I think that is probably true for a lot of the people that built it. And I don't mean to say that they're, smarter is the wrong thing. It knows more than you perhaps is a better way to say that because certainly the people that built it were smart. And the people that use it are smart, but it really is targeted for people in temperate environments, right? So I mean, it was built in San Francisco and that's great. Where it completely falls apart is if you live somewhere where it gets and stays below like, you know, 30 for weeks at a time, 30 Fahrenheit for weeks at a time. And if you live in one of those environments, you have figured out what works well for your house, either that or you are independently wealthy and you don't care what you spend on your utility bills. It's one or the other, you know. But bringing a nest into that environment is an endlessly frustrating scenario because it's like, no, no, no, no, no, trust me. I know how this house works. Like you got to work with me here. And it's tough. I have a nest here in the studio and you can wrangle it, but it takes a lot of work because it's not its default state. By default, it just wants to figure out what you want. It's like, yeah, no, no, no, no. I actually already kind of know. So let me do this, but it'll try and outsmart you. The Ecobee, I wouldn't say is not, in fact, I would say is intuitive. It's great. It was also built in Toronto where it happens to get cold for long stretches of time. So you won't be surprised to hear that the way the Ecobee works is it, it lets you program it and then it will do some smart things. Like if it notices that you're home during a period where you've said you're away, well, then it'll turn the heat on, right? But, and it has recovery times that are more built towards this type of climate. And using both of them in parallel with each other, there's just no competition. The Ecobee is a much better solution if you're in a climate where you've got, real hot and real cold. They don't, I mean, they have like weeks of it in San Francisco, but not seasons. And the Ecobee is cool because you've got these remote sensors. So a lot of us in New England, you know, you have one zone of heat per floor and a lot of cases or whatever. And that's not helpful because the thermostat's in a hallway somewhere. It's like, well, yeah, but I want it to get the temperature right in the living room. So Ecobee has these remote sensors that you put in like your living room or your kitchen or wherever. And it will sense which rooms you are in with motion sensors and adapt the heat to get the temperature you want in the rooms that you are actually in, which is really cool. So, and I've tried, so those are some Wi-Fi thermostats. I will caution people to stay away from some of these off-brand, like I've tried some of these far less expensive Wi-Fi thermostats. You can make them work, but like they're sketchy. So I haven't found one that, you know, one of these sub $100 Wi-Fi thermostats that I feel comfortable about yet. But you've used the Bluetooth ones. But I have. Not Wi-Fi, right? You're using Bluetooth ones or Zigbee or something, right? Z-Wave. Z-Wave, okay. So here's the thing. So to go on the other end of the spectrum, so Dave has had hands on with what we'll call the smart thermostats. I have extensive hands on which I'm gonna call stupid thermostats. Oh. Not that they don't work, but the thing is my thermostats, Dave, I intentionally wanted to get a thermostat that was as generic as possible. So the protocol, but then this gets a bit more complex compared to the other situation here with the smart thermostats and that you probably want to get a smart home hub. So the thing is I got a generic Z-Wave thermostat and that's the protocol that a lot of home, smart home devices use and the smart home hubs will talk to. So I got the Go-Control thermostat. It's kind of weird because the thing is it's more of a commercial device. I actually met with them at CES and I'm like, even when I tried to buy it, it was like I could only find one or two offs like on Amazon. Oh, interesting. It was like nobody was willing to sell me a box, but the thing is I was able to buy them, but I think it was like contractors that were like... Yeah, they were reselling them. So I got one for like 40 bucks and one for 50 bucks and stuff. So the company is not necessarily, and I told them this and I'm like, yeah, I'm fine with that. I mean, I was able to buy your product. Sure. The thing is it's a Z-Wave thermostat and the thing is it offers basic services with a smart home hub in that you can, depending on the platform and almost all, whether it be Wink or I've abandoned them and I now have the smart things from Samsung, but you can set trigger points. So my needs are simple. It's like, okay, at this time, set the heat to this. But you could also have it be smart, right? Like, I mean, you could have it say, if I'm home, even during one of these periods, you'd have to set up the rules. Like you said, your thermostat is dumb and that it needs something else to be its brain, but you don't have to be its brain. Like you could program a thing to be its brain. Yeah, okay. So if I had like a either a presence sensor, which I think some of these smart thermostats have, right? Like the nest knows if there's somebody in the room, right? Yes, but you also have a presence, well, you have a presence sensor in your phone, right? Like you could use a geofence to trigger a rule on your smart phones, right? I mean, you would be a little bit like- So the answer to the question is that you could build your own. It'll take additional work, but it may do more. It may give you what you want. Yeah. Yeah, because as you pointed out or you've observed with the other products, sometimes they don't make the right decision. Yeah, the Ecobee works well for you. They're like, I'm smarter than you. But yeah, and there have been a couple of occasions with the Ecobee where it's like, why is it doing that? And it's like, oh, right, I get it. Okay, now I understand, right? Okay, yeah. But yeah, they do, they think for you. And honestly, if like the Ecobee I feel like has saved us money in the long term because it allows me to be more aggressive with when I turn off the heat, knowing that, look, if, you know, I just have the heat off in the house during the day. There are many days where Lisa or one of the kids even are home because they live lives of leisure and don't even go to school a lot of the time and yet they do really well. No, it works out. Like they've, look, I don't regret it. You're gonna hear about this. If you can organize your life so that you can be a person of leisure, that's fantastic. And so I live with these people that are men and women of leisure. These people. And yeah. And so they're home during the day a lot. And the Ecobee is smart about that. It's like, oh, someone's home. Okay, I'll keep the temp up. But otherwise it's off. So I don't have to like actively think about it. So yeah, that's interesting, huh? Right, so what I do is I either, so the thing is the default is like, you know, I have it heated up in the morning and then turn it off. And the thing is, well, if I'm home, then I'll either manually press the buttons on it because you wanna have manual control. Of course. Trust me on this folks. And this is something that I see a lot of people that get into the smart home thing don't quite realize is, and I'm telling you, think about this. What's your backup plan if you lose power? Well, if you lose power, then... And that's all I'm gonna say is that some devices are better than others. If you lose power, your boiler won't start. Correct. But I found this out during Superstorm Sandy. You know what did work? Is that I was like, can I take a hot shower? And the answer was yes, because the hot water heater doesn't need electricity. It just needs gas. Oh, because your hot water heater is propane and it is not electrically fired, right? Okay, okay, yeah, fair. Right, it just sets a pilot. But it was funny because I was actually kind of, I felt like I had an episode of the DUM. I'm like, how come I didn't realize that I could get hot water without... Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. But the thing I wanna reiterate is that, think about the situation where your smart devices do not have power, at least in my case. So for example, I have battery-powered thermostats. So even if I lost power, well, the thing is then, yeah, no, to your point. Yeah, so here's an interesting thing, right? Cause there's, yeah, if you've got a boiler, there's 24 volts of AC power, oddly enough, that is running your boiler. No, it's a decision. Yes, agreed. But that's what it is. If you have what they call the common wire or the C wire running from your boiler to where your thermostats are, then you also have 24 volts of power there. If, like many homes, you only have two wires running to your heating thermostat, then you have 24 volts of power, but only in terms of when the circuit is closed, like when the heat is actually running, otherwise you don't. And the Ecobee, at least the ones that I've used, I haven't tried the Ecobee before yet, I actually wanna try that. But those require you to have that C wire, which means if you have, say, generated power or battery power to run your boiler, which is totally possible. I know someone that ran a boiler for days off of a UPS that they took from their computer. Well, because it's so very little power to turn the thing on. I mean, it's running on oil or propane or whatever, or natural gas. But if you've got that, then you're fine. Otherwise, well, then your thermostat wouldn't run anyway. So like the Nest, here in the studio, the nice part about the Nest is that it is, it will do what they call power stealing. It will charge its own battery from the red and white wires, from just the single circuit that's there. It doesn't need the common wire. Yeah, they say that it- There's juice there. Exactly. They say that it can cause problems for some people. I've never experienced one. And that's the reason Ecobee did not enter that world. But, you know, there you go. So, yeah. No, it's interesting. It's kind of like the ring or some versions of ring. Yeah, right. Is that they leech power from the doorbell. Which is no, it's totally good thing because it keeps the battery charged. Yeah, keeps it going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. Yeah, my ring doorbell has never run out of power because it's, you know, it's just right there. So, yeah, it gets- Oh yeah, mine's still at 100, last time I checked. Right, yeah. So, what's our story here, folks? Think about if you lose power when you get your spark home and your thermostats because they may or may not work. That's why I haven't put a smart thermostat upstairs because I need to be able to run like off the generated power. So, yeah. All right. John, while we're on the smart home subject, John has a question, not you, John, but, you know, listener, John, where is it? There it is. He says, oh yeah, that's right. We were talking, actually, I guess we answered one of his questions in a previous episode about smart home. And he says, I was under the assumption that these companies can read the data that's stored on their respective servers. So, the smart home companies, Amazon, Google, Ecobee, et cetera. He says, indeed, we've heard stories about employees watching videos, listening to conversations and accessing data. He says, but you mentioned that when the data is stored, that it is encrypted at rest on their servers. Am I thinking about this entirely wrong? He's got two questions, but let's answer this first one. No, you're not wrong. It is stored encrypted on their servers. The catch is that it is stored encrypted with their keys. So, if the wrong employee has access to the data, he or she can use the keys of the provider, Ecobee, Amazon, Google, whoever it is and look at your data. And that can, as you said, there have been some examples of that. So, yeah, stored encrypted does not mean out of sight from prying eyes, from all prying eyes. So, there you go. Yeah. Any thoughts on that before I move to the next one, John? No, you're right. If somebody has the key, so, yeah. I mean, I think I'm with you. You're gonna have bad eggs in every basket, right? It's possible. Correct. It's human nature, right? And I would speculate that when I did my corporate thing and we stored data about certain customers, we may have... No, we didn't, absolutely. That's right. We would not look at personal confidential data without permission because that's just unethical. The way I run my house, I am totally fine having cloud-based cameras like the ring stuff aiming outside and away from the house. I have my doorbell, I have two of the floodlight cameras and they're awesome. And I have no issue with that data being stored on ring servers. I do also have a couple of indoor cameras that are aimed inside the house. And those are not cloud-based. They store to my Synology on my... I use Synology Surveillance Station and I am the only one, or my family too, but we are the only ones that can see that it is stored locally here and it does not leave. As far as you know... That's right. Well, you know, if you want to see me... Though, for example, if I just, you know, exhibited my massive hacker skills, I may be able to get into your network and watch you and you wouldn't know it. Yeah, it's powerful. It's totally possible. It would require a high level of skill, oh yeah, persistence, and you not detecting someone trying to hack you. Right, all of those things. Yeah, but it's possible, right? You can mean... Actually, you of all people might have the best chance at that. Now, I mean, if you want to see me, you know, come down in the morning in my underwear to get like orange juice or something, like, I guess. I've had my fill of that, so... Right, yeah, as I say, I'm going to be at your house on Thursday, so, you know, there you go. Yeah. I just prefer, unlike our friend Jeff, that I just wear pants. Yeah, no, that's always seems to be the rule. Or at least boxers, come on, something. Exactly, exactly. There you go. The second question he had was, I understand these devices communicate with their respective home bases regularly. Is that communication channeled through their apps or does it go directly from the device through to the internet? He says, either way, if I log out of my account, does that communication stop? So we're talking about HomeKit devices because HomeKit devices are spoken to directly by either your iPhone or your HomeKit Hub, be that a HomePod or Apple TV or whatever. So the question is, it depends, right? The devices do not communicate through the app to the cloud. They communicate directly to the cloud. Like my Ecobee thermostat talks via Wi-Fi to my router out to the cloud, my app doesn't even have to be, I don't even have to have the app installed if I don't want, I do want, and so I do. The Nest is the same way. All of my other Wi-Fi smart home devices are the same way. John's Z-Wave and Zigbee devices communicate with the SmartThings Hub, which then communicates with the cloud. It doesn't need John to run an app. So that is all true. Now the question, if I log out of, if I log my thermostat out of my account, does it still talk back to Ecobee? I don't know. And I would imagine that the answer to that, in fact, I am certain that the answer to that is different for every device and every manufacturer because of how they do things. It wouldn't surprise me if those devices do still communicate back because otherwise how do you sign them in, right? It needs to be doing something. But one way, actually, if you want to stop them from communicating, go in and remove your Wi-Fi credentials from the device. Now it definitely won't be communicating with anything. Oh, and what's the tool? Princeton, was it Princeton? Yeah, the Princeton people, that's right. Now, you know what? The thing is I ran that tool, and I don't know. I think it's because it uses something that some of us may know about, but if you don't, it's called ARP spoofing. Right. Address resolution protocol. And the thing is, this is something deep within the bowels of TCPIP, where if you know this one weird trick, kind of like the internet ads, you can impersonate somebody else. The thing is, I ran the tool, Dave, and all of a sudden, like not 30 seconds later, all of my eros went red. Oh, yeah. And then I think, Eero Plus, I'm pretty sure, I'm almost certain what happened is Eero Plus was like, whoa, dude, somebody's like hijacking your network, so I'm going to knock everybody off one. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's fascinating. All of a sudden, all of a sudden, I was like, not able to communicate. And then, you know, I was looking at the light on my ero. Yeah. Or my two eros downstairs, and they were red. And I'm like, well, red's bad, right? Red's bad. So I think Eero Plus was stepping in saying, you know, that it looks like somebody's attacking you. So you're going to be careful and run tools like these. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I do want to run it more because, yes, I'm very interested in the specifics of either the encryption or just what are these, who are they talking to or what are they saying? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. No, I'm glad that those folks at Princeton built that tool. It was it was it coincidentally. I happened to be touring Princeton like three days after we talked about that tool. So I didn't meet with anybody there. But I wish you talked to them. Oh, well, I let everybody know that that, you know, whenever we mentioned something in the show, I just let them know. And so I let the Princeton people know and it just so happened, they replied to my email while I was sitting and waiting for the pre-tour presentation to begin. And it was like, so I replied. I'm like, ironically, I'm replying from such and such hall on Princeton's campus. So it's I don't know, it's just whatever. That was good. Anyway, I want to thank all of our premium subscribers that whose contributions came in in the last couple of weeks. If you're interested in becoming a Makikap premium subscriber, of course, we would appreciate it. It is not mandatory by it by any stretch. This is for those of you that can and want to help support the show directly, we all appreciate it. When I say all, I mean, everybody, all the listeners and certainly me and John, of course. But but yeah. So this week, we had actually in the last two weeks because I don't think we did this last week, we had a one time contribution from Sandra from New Hampshire for 100 bucks. Thank you, Sandra. On our monthly $10 plan, we had contributions from Robert from Alabama, Tony from California, Gary from New York, Frederick from Tennessee, Elizabeth from Virginia, Robert from Florida, Steven from California, Ward from Arizona, Joan from Florida, Ev the Nerd, Olga from Washington. I get to meet Ev the Nerd. That was good. And Brian and Roe and many other people. 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And on the biannual $25 every six month plan, Paul from Massachusetts, Steven from Pennsylvania, Patrick from Louisiana, Paul from Florida, Brent from Pennsylvania, Peter from Oslo, James from Victoria, Jeff from San Diego, Dorsey from Texas, Tony from Chicago, Joe from Austin at 50 every six months, Michael from Maryland, Francis from New South Wales, Larry from California, John from Michigan, Phil from New Mexico, Chris from DC at $50, Anders from Wastras at $35 every six months, and Stacy from California, thanks to all of you. And like I said, maccicab.com slash premium is where you can go to learn all about that. So thank you so much to all of you. You rock. I'm putting my hints together and thanking you. You can't see it. I am too, Dave. I'm wondering, though, do we mention our email at some point in the program? We haven't. The next question actually came into our email, which is feedback at maccicab.com. And you know, I heard you perfectly. I think we have a crystal clear connection here with no, well, a little lag. I don't know. I'm seeing like 20 milliseconds. But anyways, I think what you said, Dave, was feedback at maccicab.com. I said feedback at maccicab.com. And that's the address to which Mike wrote his question about plex streaming. He says, I use an iMac 5K late 2014. Lots of RAM, lots of storage as the server and have all my files on the Synology over the network. A streaming movie started stuttering when the iMac initiated Carbon Copy Cloner, which was copying some unrelated files from the Synology to an external drive on the iMac. I received a message on Plex that there was not enough bandwidth to stream the media and the movie would start and stop. Once Carbon Copy Cloner was finished, everything was back to normal, and the movie streamed just fine. I use a direct ethernet connection between the iMac, the Synology, the Apple TV that is playing the media. The movie was a large file, uncompressed Blu-ray at about 30 gigs, but I don't typically have any issues with these. So I have some questions. Does it make sense that Carbon Copy Cloner would use enough bandwidth to slow down the network? Is there a good way to monitor local network traffic to determine how the network resources are being used? And is there a way to protect a defined amount of bandwidth on the local network for certain activities like Plex streaming? So I want to take a step back here and not assume that bandwidth was your issue. Yes, I realize that in the end the amount of yes. And I'll explain why, but I may be wrong. And please challenge me on this. But I realize in the end, the data was not getting to the Apple TV in time. So definitely that's the problem, but I'm not convinced that ethernet bandwidth was the issue. It is one possibility, but I don't think it was. So let's think about this. Carbon Copy Cloner was copying data from the Synology down to your Mac, essentially flowing data in the same direction as the movie. Reading from the Synology across the ethernet to your Mac, and then the Carbon Copy Cloner data is being stored to a drive there. And the Plex data is then from the Mac being sent back out across the wire to the Apple TV. Even 1080p streaming doesn't take a lot of ethernet bandwidth in the grand scheme of things. Doing some back of the napkin math, it's like six megabits per second or something, I think. Maybe a lot less than that, depending on compression and things like that. So it could be bandwidth, but it's probably not ethernet bandwidth. I'm thinking the bottleneck is his Synology. I'm curious what kind of disk station it is. I think it's a 2013-based disk station. He sent me some data. It's only got two gigs of RAM. Yep. 13 tells us that it was made in 2013. So it's right? That's what I said, yeah. So that's quite dated. Correct. Okay, no, I was just clarifying for people that don't understand their technology. But yeah, so there's an old unit with probably not a very beefy processor. Yeah, and he's asking Carbon Copy Cloner to read data from that Synology as fast as it can and send that data across Apple File Protocol or SMB. Both of those things take CPU time. Both of those things require RAM. So that's where I think the bottleneck is, is we're asking the Synology to send us data. And because there's no way to tell Carbon Copy Cloner, hey, ask it more slowly, right? You're just saying, give me that file and it so it reads that file and it goes and saves it over there. And I think that's where the problem is. It could be a CPU thing on the Mac, but I really don't think that Mac is gonna have CPU trouble doing what it's doing. It's not even transcoding the movie. It's just, you know, send it to Mac. Okay, I was gonna ask you that. Do you believe transcoding, which is when a video file is in one format and the receiver wants it to be in another, I guess is the best way to explain it. That's right, no, that's a good way to. Somebody needs a processor to do that. Now it could be a Synology processor, which, hey, the latest Synologies and even this one, I mean, I got it in 2013 and it actually does pretty good, Dave, for a video work. That's the thing is I ran a 2012 for a long time. I ran a 412 plus and it did fine with some transcoding. I don't know that it would do 4K stuff. So the question is here, is it the transcoding mechanism? No, there's no transcoding. There's no transcoding on this, this video. And the transcoding would be done by the iMac, not the Synology in this scenario, because Plex server could run on the Synology, but it's not in his scenario. It's running on the iMac. Oh, it's not, okay. So is it, I mean, but it sounds like the pipe is big enough. So what's the bottleneck here? CPU or RAM on the disk station. I think we're just reading too much data. So there's a couple of things you can use, just like you can use Activity Monitor or iStat menus on the Mac, there's an app on the Synology called Resource Monitor that will give you the same type of data in its performance tab. And you can see is the CPU getting maxed out. It probably is. I know it sounds strange, but when you're reading lots of data, that actually causes a CPU load on the Synology because it has to send it across the network. It has to use SMB or AFP or whatever protocol you're doing. And only having, I know it doesn't, two gigs of RAM might not be enough for what you're doing, depending on what else is running on the Synology. So check that out. Well, the protocol as well. Correct. Well, you mentioned, I think you mentioned, the protocol, the thing is AFP is probably not the best choice. Yeah, and I don't know if he's using AFP or SMB, but either one is going to use some CPU time, right? So I really think that's what it is, but you gotta just check the Resource Monitor. One piece of advice that I will share is depending on which Synology, I think it's the 1513 plus that he said, which means it has five drive bays. And so if he has an extra drive bay, buying even like a 128 gig or a 256 gig SSD and putting that in and configuring it as an SSD cache, that might solve the problem. Because if the problem is reading data and it says in the Synology is smart enough to say, oh, that movie file is something I'm routinely accessing right now, I should put that on the SSD, now it's offloading some of that responsibility. So an SSD cache in your Synology can make a huge difference. I've actually been messing around with a couple of things on the Synology in this front lately. We love those Seagate Iron Wolf rotational drives. Well, they also have SSDs. And the SSDs, the Iron Wolf SSDs, I've got two of them in one of my disk stations now. So I have a read write cache on that. And it's a, you know, they're 240 gig drives. They do about 500 megabytes a second in terms of reads. And writes on the 240 gig are about the same. Sorry, writes on the larger drives are about the same. Writes on the 240 gig are like half of that, like 250 megabytes a second. But if you get the 500 gig or the one terabyte or even the two terabyte Iron Wolf, those are about 500 megabytes a second reads. But really, like I've been really impressed with those. And of course, they're Iron Wolf drives. So, you know, the system knows about them and can do all those cool things. If your disk station is capable, and not all of them are, but if your disk station is capable, the some new disk stations like yours and mine, John, the, I have the DS 1019 plus, you have the DS 918 plus, they're essentially identical with one drive bay difference. They have M.2 NVMe slots on the bottom. They've got two of these built for an SSD. And that way you don't have to use a drive bay. You just pop one of these things in. And I've been testing one of those with this new SSD. It's actually built to be like a high performance. So, is this a cache or is it a full drive? No, it's treated as a cache by the system. You can figure it as a cache and it cannot be a full drive. Yep. But I put one of these in. But no, I get that because and then I'll go. Okay, yeah. So, I'm using this. Well, no, the thing I wanted to add is that the 713 that I have, even that I have an OCC SSD set up as an SSD cache. I mean, they show you all these stats. And the thing is, I'm pretty convinced that it's, even though it's an older system, I mean 2013, but having the ability and DSM is really good about this is that DSM is like, oh, okay, you got an SSD here. You want to make it a cache? And I'm like, yeah. And it really speeds things up. And as you're pointing out, you can see it from the performance of the DSM offers. No, this one that I'm using in the, the distation, the NVMe M.2 SSD cache is this new one from this company called Asura ASURA. It's their Genesis Xtreme that they sent me to test. Yeah, I mean, it's super fast. Like 3,400 megabytes a second reads and almost the same speed in writes. Yeah, yeah, thousands of megabytes. Right, it's smoking fast. And it really makes a difference. It's cooking in there. It comes with this crazy like heat sink around it. I had to take that off because it wouldn't fit in the Synology without it. But it's, it's cooled enough that that doesn't matter in the Synology. It's more for if you're putting it on like a motherboard or something. So yeah, but yeah, anyway, so there you go. Steve had a very related, so hopefully that helps, Mike. Steve had a very related and very quick question. He said, Dave, you recently talked about the migration of your NAS data, which I've now finally completed, yes. But in that same podcast, I kind of heard you say that you no longer had the DS18, 15 plus, but if my memory is okay, it was the DS10, 19 plus. I have the 15, 15 plus and it's not always satisfied with video encoding to my Apple TV. I'd like your inputs on my options. So yes, I have upgraded to the, one of the very latest ones, which is the DS10, 19 plus. It is, it only has, I say only, it has five drive bays. My DS18, 17 plus, which is effectively the same thing as the 18, 15, like CPU-wise they're, it's the same and all that. It has eight bays, which is nice, but the 10, 19 plus has a CPU that has a hardware transcoding engine in it. In fact, it's, as I said before, the exact same CPU that you have, John, in your 9, 18 plus. And it's amazing. Having moved everything over, I'll start a Plex movie or something and see it needing to transcode because Plex will tell you. And Plex will tell you, oh yeah, I'm using the hardware transcoder and you look at the CPU on the disk station and it's just like cruising along, no problem. So yeah, it makes a big difference having a hardware transcoding engine in there. I highly recommend it. So yeah, it's good stuff. So yes, and I do still have the 18, 17 plus and I've been using that as my backup destination. So yeah, it's a charmed life I lead, but it's good. Any thoughts on any of this, John? You've been- I'm charmed, you're charmed, everybody's charmed. You've been moving a lot of your stuff over to the 918 as well, right? Well, I did that per your suggestion. I don't think I have, I've never had a streaming issue when I do the Synology DS video program in my Apple TV. But just to free up space, I did it and the only thing that it taught me and will probably probably talk about it in a future show is that I saw the throughput when I was copying it from one Synology to the other and it was over 100 megabytes a second, which means the bonding worked. The Ethernet bonding worked. It's true. Listener Bill actually chimed in on that because we talked about, right? I casually mentioned that the Ethernet bonding in the previous episode and he says what Dave did not say is that this Ethernet bonding does not happen automatically. If you just plug in the two ports, you'll get two Ethernet addresses, two IP addresses for the NAS and no speed increase at all. You must manually set the ports to bond and he sent us a, you know, Synology's article about that, but he's right. You got to go into control panel. I think he's kind of right. Well, no, he's definitely right. You have to bond them together. It won't happen automatically. Well, no, you have to, but my question to you is that, so for example, Dave, in my situation, I have two different bonding scenarios. I have one where I actually had to set up my TP-Link switch to do this wacky bonding protocol with my switch, but then with my other Synology, they have another option that says, hey, you know what, choose this option and you don't have to, so I have a blend of the two, but because they're blended, I was able to get over a hundred microbikes a second. Yeah, so on the one where you set your switch up to bond them, you didn't need to set the Synology to bond, but where the switch couldn't, then you set the Synology. Well, no, I did. So Synology, when you go to network and configuration, they're like, all right, how do you want to bond these? And it's like, do you want to use this kind of protocol agnostic thing where we'll figure it out and you don't have to set up your switch. And then the other one is, well, you got to set up your switch for 802. It's some protocol and, you know. Right, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's right. So Synology is smart enough with their new, but here's the weird thing, Dave, is that the configuration screen on my newer Synology running the same version of DSM was different from my older one. Huh. It offered selections, but the wording was different, so. So you're talking about IEEE 802.3AD, which is otherwise known as like. I believe, yes. Yes. Like aggregation. So that is the protocol where you have to set up your switch. Right. To understand that, and then the Synology will talk to it using that language, but then Synology also offers a kind of protocol agnostic thing where they just kind of figure out how to do that without you having to set up your switch. That's right. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But all I'm saying is, dude, when I saw over 100 megabytes a second throughput. Oh, yeah. Yeah, if you've got the Synology tool and you're doing big, I was like, Yeehaw. Yeah, like movies or whatever, you can go like, I saw over 150. It was, yeah, it was smoking. It's good, it's fun. It's, you know, it's data. With the new 10 megs, with the new 10 meg machines. 10 gig. Who knows where we can go. 10 gig, I'm sorry. 10 peg, what am I talking about here? All right folks. Thank you so much for listening. We already told you the email address. We already asked you to leave us reviews. That's enough. We don't need to ask you anything else. That's, you've done enough. Just send us your questions. How about the phone number? Nope. The phone number? We've done enough? They've done enough? We've asked enough. So we're not going to tell them that they can call us at 206-666 geek, Dave. No, because that phone number doesn't work anymore. That hasn't worked in years. What? So we have to, if they're going to dial the phone, it's 224-888 geek. That's right. Yeah, so don't use the 206. Sorry about that. That's okay. Cash fly, I would like to thank, because they provide all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Of course, I want to thank, well, all of you for listening. I want to thank our sponsors, clear at clearme.com slash mgg, smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast, Other World Computing at maxsales.com, barebonesoftware at barebones.com, and Eero at Eero, E-E-R-O dot com slash mgg. Hope you have a good week, folks. We will see you in a week. Send us your questions. Send us your tips. And please, no matter what you do, don't get caught. Maiden!